The Joy (and Pain) of the Kid-Free Vacation

For this writer, an adults-only vacation is bliss...with an anxiety floater.

As soon as they read the next sentence, some people might hate me for it: Once a year for the past two years, my husband and I leave our now two-year-old daughter with grandma and take an adults-only vacation to an island somewhere in the Caribbean. People who can’t lie on the beach all day because they’d be “too bored?” Not us. I like to joke, albeit badly, that it is with heavy hearts that we embark on this Adult Swim of vacations, but it’s true. Each time we travel without our daughter, without fail, I experience excitement—followed by crushing anxiety.

Phase one of vacationing without kids is unadulterated joy. When the booking confirmation hits your inbox, it’s a natural high. In the months leading up to our most recent trip to Harbour Island in the Bahamas, I shamelessly pinned to Pinterest things to do (take Instagram photos—er, I mean, take relaxing strolls—on the famous Pink Sand Beach) and places to eat and drink (lobster quesadillas at Sip Sip! Conch salad at Queen Conch!) In my everyday life with a two-year-old, merely taking a lengthy shower is like a spa treatment, and the prospect of days of relaxation feels like a heist I can’t quite believe we’re pulling off. The promise of this exotic escape buoys me in my lowest moments. Said two-year-old hurling an apple juice box (organic, don’t worry) at my face? I cling to the knowledge that, soon enough, I’ll be drinking a rum-dum under a hut. In peace.

But this realization also brings me to stage-two: searing anxiety. The knowledge that I will miss this little girl; that she’ll miss me, too. That she’ll call for me when she wakes up in the morning like she does every day, and I won’t be there. It’s like a stick-figure meme a friend shared on Facebook recently: all day long, the stick-figure parents plead with their kids, “Stop throwing! No fighting!” and finally cry, “I can’t take it anymore!” But in the fourth frame, the stick-parent leans over the sleeping child’s bed and beams, “I love you so much I might die.”

Where you’re in the throes of child-rearing (oh, and working a full-time job), parenthood can feel like Leo in The Revenant. Raw bison liver? Please. Try cabin fever in a New York apartment with a two-year-old who insists on watching Frozen on a loop. But when you step back, take a few deep, yogic breaths and reflect, you know you love this child just as much—if not more!—than any mom in a black and white Johnson & Johnson commercial.

Unfortunately, there’s also the fear that, as bleak as this is going to sound, my husband and I will die in a plane crash and orphan her—most likely, I was convinced before Harbour Island, on the tiny, hot pink propeller plane from Ft. Lauderdale to Eleuthra. As it bumped over the Caribbean, I could see our tombstones: Here Lie Selfish Jerks En Route to a Child-Free Vacation. I know I’d pinned those lobster quesadillas as “to die for.” But were they, really? I don’t know if it made me feel better or worse to learn I wasn’t alone in this fear: a few friends and colleagues have told me that, even when they do go on adults-only trips, they don't fly with their partners for this very same reason.

Pesky thing, parental guilt. It can follow you to even the most beautiful, faraway places. In the era of attachment parenting; detaching for four nights and five days, leaving our daughter behind (eating Pirate’s Booty for breakfast and enjoying unlimited Frozen viewings at Nana’s house) feels like a crime.

And yet, we do it anyway. We do it for ourselves, our sanity, and our marriage. A U.S. Travel Association study found that couples who travel together have happier, healthier relationships, and that 86 percent of those who take trips together “believe the romance is still alive.” This doesn’t have to mean rose petals and hot tubs a la The Bachelor fantasy suite; taking a golf cart around Harbour Island in the rain, stopping for real chickens to cross the road, looking (unsuccessfully) for the island’s storied haunted house, was romance at its best.

Still, we missed our daughter. We talked about her over dinner at The Dunmore. We even made the mistake of FaceTiming her on day-three; though I knew she’d been perfectly happy with my mom, seeing my face made her cry, and little piece of my soul died. I had to remind myself that, however selfish it seems, we hoped our adults-only caper would actually benefit her; that taking time to recharge would, hopefully, make us better partners and parents. It’s like the pre-flight safety rule: put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you attempt to help anyone else.

Let the record show that we take family vacations, too—our daughter has splashed around in the Florida sun, fed horses at a farm in Vermont, and taken over a gem of an Airbnb in Woodstock, New York. I look forward to many more of these memories. But as a friend recently joked, vacations with small children should be called “trips,” rather than “vacations,” because, frankly, they’re not the most relaxing. While on Harbour Island, my husband and I spied one such trip: three lively little children and two gold-star parents who built sandcastles, played paddle tennis, and chased them in and out of the water. All. Day. Long.

We’ll bring our daughter back here one day, we decided. I raised my rum-dum and stretched out under the hut. Cheers to that.